Approaching the solstice, we make our way to a nearby field of stubble, bottles of water and a trowel stashed in Milt’s backpack. Weeks earlier, this spot had been as a lush meadow, refulgent with wildflowers. Vivid red Indian Paintbrush spread like wildfire across the whole area. 
And that was the problem, of course: this open space so close to our urban interface set up red flag reminders of the fire danger that threatens the Front Range of the Rockies every summer.
And so the space was mowed, even though it was too green to have actually burned. For days, as the meadow turned into straw, we watched for any sign of new Paintbrush.
When, finally, a couple of stalks poked up from the rubble, we felt compelled to dig up one to both save and savor, for the mowers would return repeatedly over the coming months. We will return the Paintbrush to the meadow when the mowers leave at the end of summer.
We carry it home and temporarily pot this perfect metaphor for human actions that makes a situation worse. For wildfires are a crucial part of the natural ecosystem in the arid West, so that now, once they do get started, they burn much hotter because of the build up of dead trees and pine duff. Exacerbated by the warming world climate, extreme wildfires are becoming the ‘new normal’ in Colorado: last year’s Waldo Canyon fire was the worst in the state’s history, until this year’s Black Forest fire burned even hotter. Choking on its drifting smoke, I can’t stop hearing Thoreau’s rhetorical question:
“What is the good of having a nice house if you haven’t got a decent planet to put it on?”
So while the Indian Paintbrush sits, a pot of wildness on my windowsill, waiting patiently to return to the meadow, I ponder this question, and seek the wisdom of this native species that brings to mind Vine Deloria’s observation that, on this continent, God is Red.
In fact, this uniquely American plant grows across the prairies and plains, dances over mountains and plateaus, then rolls down onto the southwestern deserts. And Indigenous legends abound about its origins.
Probably the best known is the one about the young boy who is too small to join with his peers in hunting games. So he draws and paints instead. Longing to reproduce the colors of the wide prairie sky, he mysteriously ‘finds’ brushes containing just the right colors waiting for him on a hilltop at sunset, which he then reproduces. Leaving the brushes behind, he carries his picture home, and goes to sleep. The next morning, the hillside is alive with brilliant warm colors, for the discarded paintbrushes have turned into flowering plants.
Now as I ponder the lone Paintbrush on my windowsill, it becomes the promise, the potential of human creativity.
This brushy plant that appears to have been dipped in red paint symbolizes what separates our human consciousness from that of our animal cousins. Only through human minds has the Light from the beginning of Time become aware of itself; only in human hands has this Light that became Life shaped itself: on cave wall and rock face, paper and computer screen.
This creativity is our birth-rite. And my two youngest granddaughters are still vessels of that creativity: one already has a painting published in her ecosystem’s edition of River of Words; the other is continually drawing and writing in the notebook I brought: whole stories sprawl across the pages in a mad mixture of pictures and phonetic renditions of words.
They may lose it soon enough, as do most of us as we grow up and away from that central spark that glimmers within. Trying to fit into the world around us, we please and appease for so much of our lives that the Light may go out altogether. Yet if we are blessed, we may live long enough to become a child once again, filled with wonder and wondering, and wisdom.
But it is a choice, one I got to remake in the presence of Indian Paintbrush that I suddenly came upon while walking the rim trail at the western edge of Grand Canyon National Park. I had newly retired and did not have a clue as to what was next. As I stood at the crossroads between resignation and re-creation, I knew that I was not finished yet, not yet ready to rest and let others do the work of the world.
Too much needed to be done.
Surrounded by red and orange sparks of Indian Paintbrush, I gave myself back over to the creativity that had first surfaced in childhood. It was as a prayer, as all paying attention really is.
But what else could I do, as Mary Oliver asks in a poem? And what WAS I going to do with the rest of my ‘one wild and precious life?’ I knew then that even daring that question was playing with fire: that Fire at the core of all Being.
Now this Indian Paintbrush on my windowsill is ‘holding my feet to the fire,’ so to speak. For when I ponder it I see myself pulling off the interstate in southern Utah, in order to rest midway in my semiannual migration between Las Vegas and Denver. The stunning sandstone formations are unexpectedly studded with Paintbrush, and I can’t stop sobbing as I survey the landscape that stretches to the horizon. This public land is being leased for oil and gas exploration and exploitation; our national treasure is to be plundered for private profit.
This is the land acquired through the war with Mexico, the war that Thoreau refused to support by not paying taxes. For his nonviolent reaction, he spent a night in jail, incubating his insights on Civil Disobedience.
This is the very land that Emerson claimed Americans needed in order to become more than pseudo-Europeans. And he was right, for we soon discovered that our natural wonders far surpassed the manmade ones left behind in the old world.
We’ve been striving to protect them ever since, as slowly we have moved from a nationalistic to naturalist perspective. Increasing numbers of us now know in our bones that specific landscapes trump the abstractions of land others sing about: ‘this land is your land,’ ‘land of the free,’ ‘all over this land.’
And we are ever more adamant in our opposition to the extractive industries that would destroy our part of the planet. As for my own increasing call to activism, blame it on the single red spear of Indian Paintbrush saluting me from my windowsill.
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